Webware

Once again, Google has embedded new features into its free desktop photo management app for Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7), Picasa, after first launching said features on the online Picasa Web Albums.

This time around Google is offering collaborative Web albums. Since August, you've been able to let friends upload photos into your Picasa Web Album, and vice versa. The way you grant permission on the Web is with a subtle icon next to the name of the person with whom you've already shared the album. Your friends can then quickly add their own photos to the online mix without having to first send them to you. They'll also be able to edit photos in the album. We immediately see the appeal for those who are working together on a project, like creating a family reunion album.

Click a tiny icon on PicasaWeb to let friends contribute to your album.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

On Tuesday, Google baked this album-building tool into Picasa's upload process. When you upload photos from Picasa 3.6 to a Picasa Web album, you'll be able to grant those with whom you share the album dispensation to work with your shots. After choosing the pictures you'd like to upload, you'll choose a group you want to share with and check that box to let them contribute to your work. You can also click the "Share" button in an album on Picasa for the desktop to type in e-mail addresses for individuals.

The benefit? Assigning collaborative rights on the desktop as part of the upload process keeps you from having to log into Picasa online to grant permissions for albums and photos you've already shared.

Similarly, if others have given you the green light to meddle in their albums, you can also upload photos from Picasa 3.6 directly into albums under their control.

Tick the box on Picasa 3.6 to kick-off collaboration.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Picasa 3.6 can now also suggest contact names in the "People" tab for the app's name-tagging feature, which helps you speedily put namea to the faces in your entire photo collection. There's also more control over which photos get scanned in the Tools menu. Other additions include being able to save custom crop sizes and an option to keep a JPG photo's compression metrics when uploading to Picasa Web Albums.

Image identification company PicScout is expanding its efforts to help people identify the rights holders of images they find online.

On Tuesday the company is set to add microstock site Dreamstime's more than 7 million images to its Image Exchange catalog. What this means is that users who have the company's Image Exchange Firefox add-on installed will be able to identify when one of those images (or the other 40 million or so that are in the catalog) winds up on Web sites and in places like Google's image search.

PicScout cross-references images on the Web with its Image Exchange library to find matches of photos and stock imagery that is in its catalog.

(Credit: CNET)

The add-on, which was introduced in October and remains in private beta, displays a little blue "i" on top of images that are within PicScout's image catalog, and that can be linked back to the rights holder or stock image site. This includes images from Flickr, as long as they've been marked by their uploader with a Creative Commons, attribution-only and noncommercial license.

Either way the end user will see whose image it is without having to do the legwork. PicScout goes one step further to link people directly to where they can then buy it, or get in contact with the image owner to secure the rights to reuse it.

The company says it plans to expand to Internet Explorer next, but chose Firefox first since it offered cross-compatibility with both PC and Mac users. The two platforms will offer identical functionality since they'll be working off the same master index.

Along with the addition of Dreamstime, PicScout is also announcing that it has picked up Joichi Ito as one of its advisers. Among some of his other gigs, Ito sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation, is the founder and CEO of venture capital firm Neoteny, and is also the CEO of Creative Commons.

Previously: PicApp offers ad-sponsored stock photos (Note: this company has since been spun out by PicScout.)

Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, takes a photo of the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan. The Google Goggles feature successfully identified it.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone. On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what's been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

"It is our goal to be able to identify any image," he said. "It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query."

However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the "nascent nature of computer vision" and with the service's present shortcomings. "Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories," he said.

Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, speaking at a Google search event Dec. 7 in Mountain View, Calif.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone.

"It could be we are really at the cusp of an entirely new computing era," Gundotra said, with "devices that can understand our own speech, help us understand others, and augment our own sight by helping us see further."

Offering one real-world example of the service in action, Gundotra said that when a guest came by for dinner, he snapped a photo of a wine bottle she gave him to assess its merits. The result--"hints of apricot and hibiscus blossom"--went far beyond his expertise, but that didn't stop him from sharing the opinion over dinner.

He also demonstrated Google Goggles to take a photo of the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan, a landmark tourists may recognize even if they can't read Japanese. The uploaded photo returned a description of the shrine on his mobile phone.

Although the service can recognize faces, since faces are among the billions of images in the database, it doesn't right now, Gundotra said.

"For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition," Gundotra said. "We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place."

Google's search is a near-constant work in progress as the company strives to grow beyond supplying search results in the form of 10 hyperlinks to various Web pages.

"It's not just about 10 blue links," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience. "It's about the best answers."

"In the past 67 days, we launched 33 different search innovations," she boasted. "That's one innovation every two days."

Three more in the pipeline came to light on Monday. First, the mobile version of Google's search service to suggest completions to search queries now is geographically smart. That means, for example, a person in Boston typing "re" in a search box will see "Red Sox" as a suggested completion but a person in San Francisco will see "REI."

'Near me now' is a mobile service that shows local services to a mobile search user.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Second, a "near me now" service due to launch in coming weeks can tell users of iPhones and Android devices what's near them at a particular moment. Third, location supplied by the mobile phone can adjust product search results to show nearby stores that have a particular item in stock.

Sci-fi vision
Google isn't afraid of raising expectations of the service to the sci-fi level, where concepts such as augmented reality--an overlay of computer data that supplements what people see in the real world--have flourished for years.

Eventually, Google wants a system that lets people point to an object and retrieve information on it, Gundotra said--turning a person's finger into a real-world mouse pointer. "Today marks the beginning of that visual search journey," Gundotra said.

Google's system, like its Picasa face recognition software for photo management and face blurring in Google Maps' Street View, employs technology stemming from Google's 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a start-up focusing on face and object recognition. Founder Hartmut Neven, still a Google employee, was at Monday's event.

Neven expressed pride for one aspect of the system: the fact that much of its background work happens with no human interaction through a process he called "unsupervised learning."

"The algorithms build models for visual recognition are unsupervised," Neven said. "Based on the photos we find, models--for example, the Empire State building--will emerge."

Live translation
Speaking of science fiction, Google also showed off technology that could turn mobile phones into a computerized translation system. It wasn't quite the babelfish of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," but it did translate Gundotra's question about where the nearest hospital is located into Spanish.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience, speaks at a Google search event Monday.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The technology works using a new communications conduit to Google servers. The raw utterance recorded by the mobile phone is sent to Google's servers, which first interpret it as English. It's then translated into Spanish, and the text is sent back to the mobile phone. A text-to-speech synthesizer on the phone--for the demonstration, a Droid model running Google's Android operating system--reads out the Spanish.

The service is set to launch in the first quarter of 2010, Gundotra said.

Google already offers the ability to search by voice--notably with applications for the iPhone and Android phones that today work in English and Mandarin Chinese.

Gundotra said Japanese now has joined the other options for the applications, and that more will come. "In 2010, you will see us dramatically expand our efforts and support more languages," he said.

Language is key to Google's mission and operations, and the company touted its progress in the area. Mayer said Google now can translate words from any of 51 languages into any other. In 2008, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the company expects to increase that to 100 languages.

"We are working to break down the language barrier," Mayer said. "That focus is what unlocks the Web."

Immediately following the Friday night broadcast of MTVU's alternative-music awards show, the Woodie Awards, viewers will be able to watch a 360-degree video of it online.

The Immersive Media technology supporting the online video, scheduled for online availability at 8 p.m. PST, is designed to enable users to freely navigate around a video, 360 degrees, letting them explore angles and shots that they wouldn't normally have been able to see.

Death Cab for Cutie performing at MTVU's Woodie Awards.

(Credit: MTVU)

While I haven't seen the Woodie feed yet, I did have a chance to play around with the technology on some test videos. The video experience seems perfectly suited for a concert format. It's certainly something worth checking out, even if you don't particularly care for the music, which is scheduled to include performances by Death Cab for Cutie, The Dead Weather, Matt and Kim, and Passion Pit.

This is the first big event for the IM Live technology, so it should be interesting to see how the experience of the fully produced show on TV compares to the IM Live video experience, in which site visitors essentially become their own producers. If you end up making your own comparisons, let us know what you think.

Coca-Cola on Thursday launched a facial-matching Facebook application called the Coke Zero Facial Profiler.

As long as users have at least three photos of themselves in their Facebook profile, the application searches across other pictures from Facebook users that have used the app to find someone whose face matches theirs most accurately. Those that don't have three images can either upload a picture into the app from their desktop or capture a picture from their Webcam.

I had a chance to use the app this afternoon. After it is added to your profile, you can immediately direct it to find pictures in your profile. That process takes a little longer than I would have liked, but it wasn't so bad that I wanted to move on.

The Coke Zero Facial Profiler.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

To match up my face to someone else's, I took a picture with my Web cam. After I chose the picture I wanted to use, the app asked me to drag my image to match the shadowed outline of a head. I also needed to move markers over my eyes to ensure that the application was reading my image correctly.

My only issue with Coca-Cola's facial-matching app is that it took too long to find a match. I realize that it's searching through several faces to find the right person, but the experience left me wishing that it would end sooner than it did.

After finding a match (the app said it was a 60 percent fit), I was given the option of connecting with the person I matched up with. It was a nice option, but I was unsure how that conversation would go--"So, you don't know me, but our faces are about 60 percent alike. Wanna be friends?"--so I opted against it.

Overall, Coca-Cola's app is worth trying out once or twice, even if just for a laugh. But until more people try it out, and their images are added to the database, I'm just not sure that it has the kind of lasting power so many other apps on the social network have. I would come back to it in a month or two to see if the matching can improve, though.

After a trial release in July, Face.com on Wednesday launched Photo Tagger to the public. Photo Tagger is a free third-party application for Facebook that uses facial recognition technology to automatically tag photos of people.

Facebook users can use Photo Tagger to automatically tag their photos, it uses facial recognition software to tag all of the photos in an album. After selecting an album photo Tagger scans the photos, then batches them into groups by subject and suggests tags for them. When tags are confirmed, they are pushed live to Facebook, within the users privacy settings.

Photo Tagger also features its Face Alerts system that continuously scans newly uploaded photos automatically and alerts the user when it detects their photo, or their friends, image whether tagged or untagged.

"Face.com recognizes the ever-expanding scope of Facebook and takes it one step further--making photo sharing better, faster and more fun. Photo Tagger connects names to faces and you to your friends." said Gil Hersch, CEO, Face.com.

Google has cut the price to store photos at its Picasa Web Albums site by a factor of eight.

The photo-sharing site offers 1GB of photo and video storage for free, but now going beyond that limit costs less. The options now range from $5 a year for 20GB to $4,096 a year for a whopping 16 terabytes.

"Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20GB for only $5 a year--that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. Since most people have less than 10GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha," programmer Elvin Lee said in a blog post Tuesday.

A lot of us have well over 5 megapixels per shot to contend with, but it's still interesting. When Google introduced the option to pay for extra storage in 2007, it cost $20 a year for 6GB.

The move is the latest to indicate that Picasa, although not a high-priority Google project like Chrome or search, does have a pulse. Last year, it added face recognition to the Web site and followed suit this year with the free Picasa photo editing software the company offers. And in March, Google started adding advertisements to the Picasa site.

Picasa is gradually getting more sophisticated, but as far as I can tell it has yet to dethrone Yahoo's Flickr as a preferred hub of at the center of a lot of photography activity on the Web. Picasa is fine for sharing snapshots with the family, but it's not really the place to join groups, chat on forums, and discover what the photography world is up to.

Picasa's more modest scope isn't a problem--plenty of people just want to share some photos, after all, and Google generally tries to offer services with broad rather than specific appeal--but Flickr has more vitality in this more social era of photography--at least among its "pro" subscribers who pay $25 a year.

Another interesting comparison is Facebook, with an extraordinary 2 billion photos uploads each month and a well-used system to identify who's in a photo that Flickr only just began offering. While Facebook has a strong social angle, though, it cuts down photos to a lower resolution and really is more a place for sharing snapshots than for digging into the world of photography.

Picasa's price cut raises an interesting prospect for photography enthusiasts, though. If it's going to set its prices to try to match some portion of the dropping prices of hard drives--not just this week, but regularly--it'll gradually become a more appealing place to back up photos in the cloud. Of course, like Flickr, it's chiefly for JPEG files, not the larger and more awkward raw files serious photographers often use. But even a JPEG backup is useful, especially with synchronization tools built into the Picasa software.

Paying Google $256 per year for 1TB of Picasa storage space is getting in the vicinity of the $100 price or so a 1TB external hard drive costs. Of course you only have to pay once for the hard drive, and even a slow USB hard drive is faster to access than photos on the Net, but Google's price includes backup and some assurance that you'll still have your photos if someone steals your laptop or your hard drive fails. Plus, of course, you get to share your photos.

A big gap here is support for raw files, something that SmugMug offers in its Amazon Web Services-based SmugVault. But that costs 22 cents per gigabyte per month, a price that rapidly gets steep when you consider how fast a modern SLR can fill up a 4GB flash memory card. SmugMug, a subscription-only site, caters to the serious set, though.

Yahoo's Flickr site has deepened its relationship with photo-licensing power Getty Images so photographers can nominate their own photos for inclusion in Getty's Flickr Collection.

Previously, Getty decided which images it believed were commercially viable, and since the program launched in July 2008, it has put together a collection of more than 60,000 commercial images. Now photographers, instead of just being able to indicate that they're willing to be contacted by Getty, can actively submit a portfolio of images.

"A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter, and technical skill," Andy Saunders, Getty's vice president of creative imagery, said in a statement. "If some or all of the photos--or other images from your photostream--are selected for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, you will receive an invitation via FlickrMail. This invitation will clearly show Getty Images' initial selection of images and introduce the enrollment process."

The partnership is an interesting confluence between the old-school world of stock photography and the nouveau era of digital photography and the Internet. With digital SLRs and the Internet, high-quality photos are easier to come by, leading to the arrival of several "microstock" companies that sell photos on a royalty-free and relatively inexpensive basis. It's hurt professional stock photographers, but it's provided extra income to any number of enthusiasts and amateurs.

Flickr never launched its own microstock site, despite an abundance of enthusiasts contributing photos, but the Getty partnership does mix a commercial ingredient into the Yahoo photo-sharing site's operations.

The easy availability of photos at Flickr and other sites can lead to copyright infringement troubles. On Tuesday, Toyota USA apologized for using Flickr photos without permission:

Toyota apologizes for pulling images from Flickr without photographer permission. Images from a handful of photographers appeared on a Toyota site for five days. We're working quickly to reach out to the individual photographers involved. Until then, the images have been removed, and corrections have been made to the process of pulling images from Flickr.

So it's clear that some Flickr photos have business value, whether for their professional quality or their everyman snapshot flavor.

Getty and Flickr won't disclose any details about their business relationship, but here's what Flickr has to say about how the finances work for photographers:

Flickr has a business relationship with Getty Images, though we've never publicly discussed the specifics of the deal. Regarding the photographers, Getty Images will be the exclusive distributor of select Flickr members' content, and in turn, Getty Images will facilitate the license of such photography and will pay the royalties directly to the members. This will be a direct relationship between Getty Images and each Flickr contributor.

Flickr photographers will be asked to sign a Getty Images contributor contract, if they agree to have their images licensed for commercial use, that will specify rates for rights-managed and royalty-free royalties, as applicable. Rates for royalty-free imagery are 20 percent; rates for rights-managed (images) are 30 percent. These are directly in line with royalty rates that (Getty's) existing contributors receive.

It seems like everyone has an application directory these days, and now Flickr is no exception. While not offering up paid third-party services (yet), Flickr on Tuesday unveiled a reworked services section dubbed the "App Garden" that better showcases photo tools, and the people who have created them.

The new apps directory page manages to squeeze just about as many applications into a smaller space than the old one did. It also gives each app its own page where users can add descriptive tags and leave feedback in the form of comments. In fact, these new pages act just like Flickr photo pages, including giving registered users a way to favorite certain apps, which goes towards promoting up-and-coming apps higher up in the showcase. They also double as a shortcut to viewing other apps made by that same developer.

Flickr's new "App Garden" as the company calls it, is much more compact than the services directory that came before it. It also adds user interaction to the mix with comments and favoriting.

(Credit: CNET)

One area where the new app system has not permeated just yet is in letting users see what apps their friends and contacts are using. For instance, Flickr's activity feed--which gives Flickr users a bird's eye view of what their friends are up to, does not show when a user has favorited one of these tools. Users will only be able to see what apps they themselves have favorited from within the App Garden, and not alongside their photo favorites. There is also no way to create collections of apps you like to share with others, as you can do with the recently-released gallery feature.

These things may come in time, but for now it's already a much better system than the previous API services page. Developers have more of a chance to try to convince users to give their app a spin before they ever leave the site, and other Flickr users are now able to chime in and recommend it, either through the new favoriting system, or in the comments. Whether Flickr decides to make some of this user activity a little more public is unclear.

After the jump: The before and after of the API services menu, and what's now the App Garden.